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ON PUNS AND PUNSTERS.
"The gravest beast is an ass; the gravest bird is an owl; the gravest fish is an oyster; and the gravest man a fool."
Gravity, says Lord Bolingbroke, is the very essence of imposture. A quack or a pretender is generally a very grave and reverend signior; and though I would not venture to assert that the converse of this proposition is invariably true, I must confess, that as I am apt to doubt the virtue of an obtrusive Puritan and rigourist, so am I marvellously m*one to suspect the wisdom of your serious and solemn Precisian. While the shallow pedant endeavours to impose upon the world by a serious and pompous deportment, minds of a superior order will be often found abandoning themselves to playfulness and puerility. Plato, after discoursing philosophy with his disciples upon the promontory of Sunium, frequently indulged the gaiety of his heart by relaxing into a vein of the most trivial jocoseness; but once seeing a grave formalist approach in the midst of their trifling, he exclaimed, "Silence, my friends! let us be wise now; here is a fool coming." This man's race is not extinct. Reader! hast thou not sometimes encountered a starched looking quiz who seemed to have steeped his countenance in vinegar to preserve it from the infection of laughter?—a personage of whom it might be pronounced, as Butler said of the Duke of Buckingham, that he endures pleasures with less patience than other men do their pains?—a staid, important, dogged, square-rigged, mathematical-minded sort of an animal? Question him, and I will lay my head to yours (for I like to take the odds), that whatever tolerance he may be brought to admit for other deviations from the right line of gravity, he will profess a truculent and implacable hatred of that most kind-hearted, sociable, and urbane witticism termed—a pun.
Oh the Anti-risible rogue! Oh the jesticide—the Hilarifuge! the extinguisher of "quips and cranks and wanton wiles;"—the queller of quirks, quiddets, quibbles, equivocation, and quizzing! the gagger of gigglers! the Herod of witlings, and Procrustes of full-grown Punsters! Look at his atrabilarious complexion; it is the same that Caesar feared in Brutus and Cassias; such a fellow is indeed fit for treasons, stratagems, and plots; he has no music in his soul, for he will not let us even play upon words. Will nothing but pure wit serve thy turn, most sapient Sir? Well then, set us the example—
"Lay on, Macduff,
And damn'd be he that first cries Hold! enough!"
How,—dumb-founded? Not quite;—methinks I hear him quoting Dr. Johnson's stale hyperbole—"Sir, the man that would commit a pun would pick a pocket;" to which I would oppose an equally valid dictum of an illustrious quibbler—"Sir, no man ever condemned a good pun who was able to make one." I know not a more aggrieved and unjustly proscribed character in the present day than the poor painstaking punster. He is the Paria of the dining- table; it is the fashion to run him down, and as every dull ass thinks he may have a kick at the prostrate witling, may I be condemned to pass a whole week without punning, (a fearful adjuration!) if I do not show that the
